I’ve been away from my desk for a few weeks, either on vacation or at a couple of profitable conferences. At any rate, I haven’t kept up the “Sermon Summaries” posts for a while, and I’m anxious to hear what my friends are preaching or hearing preached. Please provide some summaries of what passages or topics you’re addressing.
Also, after the conversation Bob Bixby started regarding churches & patriotic services (comments may also be seen here and here), I’d be interested in hearing why you did or did not make Independence Day and America a major focus of your worship services yesterday.
Filed under: Sermon Summaries
I continued my series on worship. It’s been a great blessing in my own life, and I believe that the Lord is doing good things in our church body. I hope to make it a series of posts…someday. (sigh) I also hope to have them available as mp3’s at our church’s website very soon.
Yesterday we continued in Psalm 96. The gist of the message was that “the object of worship determines the character of worship.” Again, I hope to post on it more later.
One of our men preached last night from John 10, in preparation for the Lord’s Table. It was a particular blessing (a) because the point of the text was the point of his message and (b) because this is a guy that was saved in our ministry about 6 years back. What a fitting reminder of Psalm 96:3: “the LORD is great, and greatly to be praised.”
Hi Chris
I have been going like mad the last two weeks with a half week of family camp, then beat it across the ferry to home a week ago Saturday, have our three services then back on the ferry that night for a week in Alberta for my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. We arrived back home Saturday evening, then had our full day of services yesterday. I also ran up island to preach for my brother in the evening to help him out with a similar weekend of unpacking from one trip to follow up with another trip for his family today down to SC. So… I think I have stopped vibrating from all the driving.
In light of all this travel, I decided to steal liberally from Ryle’s Holiness chapter 6. Your post on the subject brought it to my attention again, so that is the direction I headed. The first message was on the Reality of Christian Growth, the second the Marks of Christian Growth and the third the Means of Christian Growth. I took a poll of my family as to which one was best, and ended up preaching the Marks again in the evening at my brother’s church.
We had a great day in the Lord.
I haven’t read Bixby’s posts or the discussion on patriotism, but as a foreign observer, I think Americans make too much of patriotism, especially in mixing it with religion. Our citizenship is in heaven and while we have duties as citizens and I am grateful for living in a society that (so far) allows freedom of religion, I don’t idolize the state. I am afraid that many Americans border on idolatry when it comes to the state. The difficulty in sorting these things out comes with the fact that America is arguably the best political system that has ever graced the earth. I am an admirer of the American constitution and the philosophy of political power that it embodies. But in the end, it is just another part of the world system and is not the source of my rights and freedoms. Those come from God.
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
So you preached Ryle? Good idea, though your people may be in for a “let down” next week. :)
I was wondering what my friend from up north would say about American Christians & holidays. Interesting. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Don.
So, Don, you’re not a flag-waiving Canadian patriotic individual? You don’t celebrate Canada Day (or whatever you call your “Independence Day”-I’m not up on info from Canada)?
All joking aside, our pastor preached from Lamantations (or was it Jeremiah? I know they’re interchangable because he kept saying “Jeremiah 3:1″ when he should have said “Lamantations 3:1″). All of this because Judah’s thoughts were that their nation would be spared any wrath from heathen nations because God was on their side. He showed that our country (the United States) is ripe for God’s Righteous Judgement because of our sin. He preached this message because he was at the Pastor’s Conference at Peniel last week, and he asked one of his former classmates at BJ what he thought was the largest “threat” to Christianity in our country. The pastor said his classmate told him it was homosexuality. Here in Columbus, we recently had the annual “Gay Rights Parade” downtown, and our newspaper (The Columbus Dishrag, uh, I mean the Columbus Disgrace, uh, I mean the Columbus Dispatch) had a front full page article in regards to the parade. Columbus (and this is nothing to be proud about, on the contrary) has the 2nd largest parade in the US. The US is begging for God’s Wrath! So, it wasn’t a patriotic message, rather a sobering message about the sins of nations being their downfall. “Pro 14:34 – Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”
That was the sermon. We ended the service with the Communion.